Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday December 23, 2011 @03:40PM
from the take-the-battle-to-the-enemy's-router dept.

smitty777 writes "Congress has recently authorized the use of offensive military action in cyberspace. From the December 12th conference on the National Defense Authorization Act, it states, 'Congress affirms that the Department of Defense has the capability, and upon direction by the President may conduct offensive operations in cyberspace to defend our Nation, Allies and interests, subject to: (1) the policy principles and legal regimes that the Department follows for kinetic capabilities, including the law of armed conflict; and (2) the War Powers Resolution.' According to the FAS, 'Debate continues on whether using the War Powers Resolution is effective as a means of assuring congressional participation in decisions that might get the United States involved in a significant military conflict.'"

To the penchant for destabilising democratically elected governments and installing puppet dictators in order to acquire resources and dominate regions militarily.

It was the peer pressure... all the cool kids had colonial empires and we wanted to be cool too. But before we could find acceptance, fashion changed and the US is now wearing the equivalent of global bell bottoms.

Depends on which country you are talking about. We owe China a lot of money. On the other hand, plenty of countries in Africa and the Middle East "borrow" money from us all the time (which we likely will never get back). So you're right, America is not the world's creditor. We don't really lend that much money at all, since lending implies that we'll get it back.

(This post sounds a little like flamebait, and I apologize for that. I'm not trying to anger anyone, just trying to point something out).

Oh I'm far from angry, just wanted to open the poster's eyes a little. If you have a crack addict who borrows 100K from the Mafia, and gives away 20K to his "buddies" while spending the other 80K on a Porsche he somehow got financing for, more cocaine, bling, and other frivolous things, then you have a fair analogy. Instead of crack read oil. Instead of Porsche and bling read any number of entitlement and useless spending (including inflated "defense" spending that gets you multi-million dollar drones that can be easily captured by Iran), etc. You would not say that this person is rich. In fact you would say that this person is going to be in deep trouble when the Mafia decide to collect. And his "friends" are fair-weather friends of convenience. And it's useless to say "I told you so", because that person is damned certain that there is nothing wrong with their life-style.

As opposed to the other nations that are already doing that, just without any formal declaration. I would be very surprised indeed if China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Israel and others weren't already engaging in offensive operations online.

There is nothing wrong with this. This entire discussion thread has taken failing to read the article to a new level. This section of the bill in question affirms that violence commenced via the Internet falls under the same rules as violence with regular guns, and thus it is subject to the laws of war and the War Powers Resolution. It is not a declaration of war, it is not permission to "fire at will." Nor is it an affirmation of pre-emptive strikes. Offensive use of force in defense of the nation is not a new or strange concept. The President has been, since the beginning of the republic, authorized to conduct offensive operations with the military to defend the United States, subject to Constitutional and Congressional limitations and the laws of warfare. This section effectively says, "cyberspace is an arena in which this may also occur." Nothing more. In that regard, it is actually an assertion that there are limits on Presidential use of the Internet for violent acts, although exactly how to apply the established laws regarding warfare to cyber-warfare is obviously a really big question.

Bad analogy. Congressmen aren't self-selected (like terrorists are), they are elected, so they actually DO represent mainstream American sentiment. (Just like how the whole don't-blame-American-citizens-for-Iraq argument stopped making sense after Bush won re-election.)

(Just like how the whole don't-blame-American-citizens-for-Iraq argument stopped making sense after Bush won re-election.)

It did?

By my math there were just over 62 million votes counted for Bush in 2004. Estimated population of the United States in 2004 was just shy of 293 million. If simple division serves me right then that means over 78% of the U.S. population did not vote for Bush in 2004 (either by voting for someone else, not voting, or being ineligible). That is hardly a large enough number for anyone to do what they want and claim some sort of democratic mandate.

A Republic is not a Democracy. While the people who voted for him might have backed his policies that hardly means "America" did. The same can be said for any U.S. president.

"By my math there were just over 62 million votes counted for Bush in 2004. Estimated population of the United States in 2004 was just shy of 293 million. If simple division serves me right then that means over 78% of the U.S. population did not vote for Bush in 2004 (either by voting for someone else, not voting, or being ineligible)."

What's your point? That the only people who have to abide by the laws signed by the president are the people who voted for him?

Well, considering that Congress are the only ones that have actual authority to declare war it really shouldn't matter which President won on that issue, but then again the American government doesn't really follow the constitution and voting doesn't really change much. In any case, there was no vote by the American people for or against the war so I'm not sure how you think the American people could have put a stop to it by voting against 'it'.

... Congressmen... are elected, so they actually DO represent mainstream American sentiment....

Correction: congressmen on both sides of the isle are elected, but for the most part do not represent mainstream American sentiment. They mostly represent the interests of the people (corporations and their lobbyists) who finance their election campaigns; a group that makes up only about 0.05% of the U.S. population.

And it got that way because we continue to vote (long-term average) to make it that way. For example, Bush was a 2-term president, and he appointed the activist judges who chose to rule broadly in favor of corporate influence of elections in the Citizens United case. John McCain ran on Campaign Finance Reform in 2000. He lost to Bush.

Don't say that plutocracy is alien to our culture. We were one of the last nations to abolish slavery. We have weak labor laws and no meaningful unions. We abhor the "

The most blatantly obvious thing wrong with this, 'FALSE FLAG'. The utterly false escalation of internet cracking to bring in news laws to monitor everyone all of the time.

Hell, they will make having an internet connection compulsory, as well as a web cam and microphone.

This thinks far more about the 1% attempting an all out assault on the freedoms of the 99%. To silence and control them, to limit their speech, to attack their freedoms via what was the people's internet.

"Debate continues on whether using the War Powers Resolution is effective as a means of assuring congressional participation in decisions that might get the United States involved in a significant military conflict."

I read the War Powers Resolution is also effective as a means of assuring congressional participation in Internet censorship.

Time for the voting public to purge this misguided house of government of all its privilege and narcissism.

Contrary to your statement the internet doesn't just self heal, as long as you take down the correct bit of infrastructure somebody has to go out and fix it. Moreover they have to recognize that something's gone wrong and that can take time if the damage is subtle enough.

Beyond that, you need people to go out and fix the connectivity to a particular region. Sure the internet at large just routes around it, but I can't imagine that even the hawks in the DoD are suggesting that we take the entire net down, mo

While I agree that it will probably be a lot more entertaining for a lot of people, consider the collateral damage that will undoubtedly be inflicted against a lot of other people (ie, techs who actually understand the internet). If congress ever actually gets their heads around the idea that the internet is almost impossible to control there will be attempted crackdowns and all manner of hell before they give up.

Yeah, who needs SOPA when you have the US military to enforce royalty payments!

Yes, it's a new age of intellectual property imperialism! Except instead of the huge royal navies of England and France fighting pirates and collecting royalties on trade routes, we'll have the DoD DDoS attacks taking down all parties that don't pony up!

It's suiting for the US, much of whose wealth and economy is now based on imaginary assets, like patents and copyrights on, well, just about anything having to do with "popular" culture or business processes. What better way to make money for nothing than to have a piece of legal paper that says that people have to pay you money for doing ${thing}s? And then having a bunch of other people fund your military, the largest in the world, to enforce those payments?

That's exactly what I thought as soon as I read the headline. Pass SOPA, allow MAFIAA to hire operators to shut down websites with nothing more than a claim of supporting terrorism.It won't change anything regarding file-sharing - but it'll sure make the people who are spending all that money supporting politicians feel better about their large bonuses.

Let's drop the charade. If robotic aerial bombardment doesn't constitute "war", then sending strings of ones and zeros through a series of tubes certainly doesn't count as "war". There is effectively no congressional oversight because cyber-warfare does not fall under the purview of "war" according to the executive branch. There's also no way for congress to cut funding for cyber-warfare since all the computers and networks are already paid for, and there's very little operational costs to waging a cyber war.

Debate continues on whether using the War Powers Resolution is effective as a means of assuring congressional participation in decisions that might get the United States involved in a significant military conflict

I assume they meant something more like: "debate continues" in legal journals, where scholars analyze some very interesting theoretical questions. Meanwhile, Presidents of either party don't find these theoretical questions particularly interesting, and don't consider them a significant barrier

We warned you people that Bush's grubbing for power would come back and bite us in the ass later on. Once power is gained, it is seldom let go of.

We warned you that the War Powers Act is unconstitutional.

Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex.

o/~ One of these things is not like the others... o/~

By "War Powers Act" you probably mean the War Powers Resolution of 1973 (the actual War Powers Acts were WW2 laws) which is intented to limit the President's ability to wage war without Congressional approval. To the degree that it functions as intended (not very well, unfortunately) it thereby serves as a check on executive power and the growth of the military-industrial complex. Those who argue that it is unconstitutional -- which regrettably include

I'm coming at it from the angle of it giving too much power to the executive: the constitution give Congress the power to declare war, full stop, and the president should on no account start a shooting war with someone else without congressional approval.

Eisenhower's original formulation was the military-industrial-congressional complex. He saw the corruption of the nation's political organs by lobbying and campaign finance way back then, but was advised to remove the "congressional" bit since he was delivering the speech to Congress.

For instance, there are limitations to how long the President can do such things before getting Congressional approval

The limit is 60 days, but that didn't stop Obama, now did it?

there are budgets that Congress must approve

Like I said before: "There's also no way for congress to cut funding for cyber-warfare since all the computers and networks are already paid for, and there's very little operational costs to waging a cyber war."

You HAVE to know this, surely you *at least* took a high school U.S. Government class?

upon direction by the President may conduct offensive operations in cyberspace to defend our Nation, Allies and interests

"Interests" is an interesting term. We have well defined (codified in law) ideas of who our allies and what our nation is, but interests can range anywhere from democracy to oil to bombing airplane manufacturing plants in Brazil and China to protect our (civilian) areospace industry.

Diplomatic cables have already revealed that we lean pretty heavily on our allies to buy Boeing and Locheed Martin products, both civilian and defense oriented. If anyone needs a reminder, we just "convinced" Japan to buy 150+ still on the drawing board F-35 stealth fighters, (things yet to fix: major fire hazards, lack of stealth, weak airframe, buggy software, bad aerodynamics) rather than the EuroFighter earlier this week, right after Kim Jong Ill died.

So wasn't there a Star Trek TOS episode where they fought their wars in their computers? Congress should be ashamed of stealing Prior Art.

Yep. To make the battles more "clean" (reduce collateral damage) they used "computer games" to carry out battles. Reason is they have been at war for 500 years and come to an agreement to make the war not as devastating. Program would tally up casulties and each side by agreement have to send some of their people into these tubes that vaporizes them. Capt Kirk blasted a portion of their computer system that also brought down both offense and defense computer (and probably severed the comm link with the oth

somebody in the u.s. hasn't been reading the geneva convention. if the U.S. is hell-bent on linking the words "cyber" and "warfare", then the U.S. had better be ready for the consequences. the consequences of "declaring war" on another country are very very simple: under the Geneva Convention, a declaration of war legitimises and grants the right for any citizen of the country being attacked to immediately take offensive action, no matter where they are, against citizens and against all soil of the aggressors.

in other words, should the United States respond with physical force against another country's citizens just because a computer which was wide open to the world (with 3 letter passwords), that is an "act of war", and the citizens of the country being attacked are automatically granted the right to take immediate offensive violent action against any United States Citizens or against any United States "property" and soil.

in other words, this is an incredibly stupid thing for the United States Government to be doing. especially given that many people in the United States Military have absolutely no idea what constitutes a cyber attack, and they certainly don't understand that 3 letter passwords are an invitation to go "cooeeee! i 0wn youuu!"

First, the Geneva Convention never gives someone the right to take violent action against all of a nation's citizens. Noncombants are afforded protection under the conventions. You should cite which convention you have derived your information from. Since the basis of your argument is false, the rest does not matter. However, I will state that if the U.S. began treating cyberwarfare as actual war, then any physical force against another country would most likely be accompanied by attempting to sever the country's lines of communication as well. Besides, all this does is address the fact that China (et al) has been pursuing aggressive cyber attacks against foreign intelligence for some time.

Huh? What country do you think would want to get into an armed conflict with the United States? There are many countries that want to be in a state of low level conflict but few want to actually be at war. We have a long tradition of making war, win or lose just miserably expensive for the opponents.

No one is going to attack the USA through violent action and if they were willing to, the Geneva Convention isn't going to matter one way or another.

The Constitution does not give Congress authority to delegate their war-making powers to ANYONE else, including the President.

If this can legitimately be considered "warfare", then there is no question whatever that it is unconstitutional. The "War Powers Act" notwithstanding... it is unconstitutional, too. You can't use one unconstitutional law to justify another.

If Congress hasn't declared war, then it's not a Constitutional (legal) war. Period. And that means we haven't had a legal war in over 60 years.

Don't misunderstand me: I don't mind the mod of "funny". But the fact that it WAS modded funny just shows that people don't know their history of the Constitution.

Seriously. This is a portion of history that seems to have been neglected. But I can give you a hint: many things are probably not how you think they are. And many things the government and the news tell you are wrong.

"The constitution does not define the wording of a declaration of war. "Yeah, nuke them if you want," is a completely valid declaration of war as much as "we the whateverith Congress decide as our second unanimous act (after our first act of giving ourselves pay raises next term) to declare war on Elbonia.""

Perhaps. But handing the decision-making power to the President is not a declaration of war of ANY kind. It is nothing more than abdication of responsibility.

The nationalization and segmentation of Internet has begun. It was a nice place with no borders and equal for everyone. But of course, old power-greedy bastards has awoken and now want to subjugate everyone under their rule, claim "territories" that they own and build armies to fight with each other. And common folks as always are blinded with "patriotism" propaganda, while really are just used as a resource for some self-proclaimed sociopathic "leaders". Since the dawn of ages. Humanity, will you ever learn?

I really think the older generation doesn't understand that the virtual world isn't just 'virtual', that actions that take place in it really do affect the real world. Actually, I don't think even newer generations understand this either. They simply believe that anything that happens in the virtual world will stay there. When their laptop is broken they can simply by a new one. A simple brute force solution for a very elegant problem.Cyberwarfare is going to turn into a very messy can of worms. Someone men

And part of human nature seems to be to frame everything as a kind of "war". But this can backfire. Back in 1964, here in the US, President Lyndon Johnson declared a "War on Poverty". Quickly, millions of poor people started asking where they could go to surrender. That war was quietly shelved soon thereafter.

We just need to find as clever a way to respond to the US government declaring war on the Internet. Is there a good way to make us all look like opponents, so we can surrender and get funds for reconstruction?

I think the term human nature is thrown about too carelessly. Human nature would imply it's in the genes. Sure, the genes allow for war and all bad things, but how about the power of culture? I think the world of today is shaped more by culture and ideas, than by genes. We are not just monkeys. We can do what we think is right.

The powerful shape the world in a way that benefits them, but humanity as a whole wouldn't want this mess, I think. It's not the genes. It's history. The history of power, money and ideas, more than it is human nature. Culture and ideas we can change. Nature, not so much.

We can overcome any genes for rape, murder an oppression with some ideas of doing the right thing. Ideas will evolve. And the Internet should help accelerate that evolution.

Aren't we in the midst of a great "evolutionary leap"? It just doesn't show in our genes. It's our collective consciousness that is getting more saturated with truth. Some powerful players are of course against all this truth, but humanity can prevail, I think.

Yeah, but we are just monkeys. Just because some people have the ability to do what they think is right has no bearing on what most people actually do. Plus, what people think is right is subjective. Do you live alone on an island, in a vacuum? I've read excellent arguments stating that rape is not a bad thing. Cite empathy and destructive repercussions all you like, but rape may have saved the human race from extinction. Good, evil, whatever... It is all subjective.

what we 'think' is right. thats a far cry from what IS right. as for what is right, i still haven't figured that out yet.

if you think hot and cold water and electricity is what is right then there is a whole lot of wrong in the world, i know it's not that simple, so instead we say it's 'needed in an civilized world' and say that there are nations or regions that deserve certain things and places that don't.i'm reading wizards first rule, terry goodkind. and the storyline

Nah; I don't think it's anything especially American. The US population is one of the most "mongrelized" on the planet. There hasn't been nearly enough time for that population to merge into any kind of self-consistent sub-population. So the behavior shown by Americans (even American politicians) is a jumble of the behaviors of all the source populations from other parts of the world.

Visually, the US population looks mostly "white", i.e., European. But the demographers tell us that this really is onl

The moment nations - any nations, US included - decided that the Internet was territory that could be owned rather than a virtual complex of ideas where data merely happened to reside in certain machines at certain times and where wiring merely happened to be the transport of choice for now, cyberwarfare was inevitable. That the Internet has adopted a spanning tree topology in many places, rather than a mesh topology, has worsened things. It's very easy to set up roadblocks on a spanning tree, it's much much harder to shut down a mesh.

(If you can't own it and can't prevent others using it, then you have nothing you can fight over. Ownership and conflict are only possible where resource denial is possible. Which is fine for end-points, I've no problem with end-points being owned and governed, but it should never have become fine for the backbone.)

HTTP-over-Torrent is hell. (It's basically what the whole Freenet concept works on. And Freenet makes molasses look high-speed.) Nonetheless, you are correct that this can be done. However, the ports can be blocked or degraded. That's what the whole deal is with biased traffic shaping*.

It would be faster, more reliable and less of a bandwidth hog if the physical topology was meshed. I'm sure you've heard the adage that the Internet could survive a nuclear bomb. Once upon a time, perhaps it might have. If it

I'm pretty sure that (D)ARPA had no intention of neutrality in terms of who was "supposed to" benefit from the communication.....

It might be informative (and maybe enlightening) if we can get people to look back at what (D)ARPA actually had in mind back in the 1960s and 1970s when they were funding the development that led to the Internet. Their original documents mostly talked in terms of just the sort of "warfare" that people are getting so upset about now.

An important part of the design was multi-path routing that could be rapidly modified, as an enemy found and took out your routers. The idea was that as long as a path existed between two points, the routing system would find it and keep those two points in communication, despite the best efforts of the enemy.

Of course, in current terms, most of the Internet would consider the US government (along with various others in China, Iran, wherever) as "enemy", since people in the US government are talking openly about actively interfering with our communication without knowing or caring who we might be.

One of the major failures in the current Internet is that multi-path routing has been pretty much nixed by the ISPs. How many data paths do you have out of your home or office? 99% of us have only one, which is a blatant violation of the original design. You should try using traceroute to list the machines along the path to a remote site. Do it several times, and see if the same path comes up each time. If so, then you are a victim of single-path routing, and that path can be taken out at any time by an enemy who has access to any of those machines along the route. Or, even worse, they can make a copy of every packet between you and that site, without you knowing that they're doing this . The original ARPA/Internet design was specifically to avoid such security risks.

If we want to keep the Internet safe from "cyber warfare", maybe we should be looking seriously at what the military people are doing with it in their private networks. And we should implement the parts of IP that have been ignored in favor of a fragile design that provides mostly single-path routes.

Then we might be safer from not just the US's perceived enemies, but also from the US government itself.

[Y]our method for determining single-path-routing is flawed. The routing takes the "best" path, in many cases the "best" path is so much better than any other that it is essentially static. However, if that connection were to go down then other routes would start being used.

Well, yes and no. If you're only interested in speed, you're right. But I've worked on several projects that explicitly and intentionally scattered a connection's packets across as many (reasonably fast) routes as were available. This was done for several reasons. One of them is directly relevant to the topic at hand: Using multiple routes defeats attempts to intercept your packets and collect them. Many encryption-cracking schemes require large contiguous chunks of a message to succeed in decoding the

And, who exactly is this "we" you speak of? Perhaps you are unaware that China has an ongoing mission, to probe any and all possible sources of intelligence and/or Imaginary Property held by the United States government and/or corporations?

So, in the face of attacks that have been going on for a decade or more, what would you propose?

Funny? I see nothing funny here. We have idiots running the country, and China is taking advantage of those idiots. We also have ignorant "consumers" who buy everything that China puts on the market, and of course China takes advantage of that too.

Some day, it will be time to pay the fiddler. We'll just have to see how that bill is payed. But, it won't be funny. I expect that it will be more tragic than funny.

Of course, I said something similar two or three years before the housing bubble finally burs

Hmm. The ID10Ts have finished building their cyber-command, staffed it with the *cough* best *cough* IT that the marines can offer, and they want to give it a spin. They're looking for a fight. Were I a general, I would not stop b*tch-slapping these people until my hand got tired, then I'd have one of my assistants take over for me: what kind of steroid-abusing, minimum legal IQ, closed-minded, in-bred, patriot (put charitably) goes looking to start a war during a time of relative peace? We have nothing to gain from this venture, and everything to lose.

Has the nation gone full-retard? This kind of behavior is supposed to be out of your system by the time you hit 18, cropping up only when you get a speeding ticket, had a bad day at the office, or are at home with the family for the holidays.

Don't get me wrong, if you need to protect something material, the US military is some of the best. But like Space, Cyber-Space is specifically un-militarized, with only a handful of shadow games being played by somewhat disinterested players (that the internet was started by a military project is not lost on me ^_^). It's a completely different battlefield, with completely different rules, and it's not going to be helped by this addition. The very action of trying to play war with the internet means the US military will succeed where its politicians have failed: the US will end up getting cut off from the global internet, as countries move to protect themselves. This action is the internet equivalent of parking some Soviet ICBMs in Cuba!

You know, once upon a time, the United States had a Department of War. It's job was to ensure that our country was always at war with some other country. We ditched it in favor of a Department of Defense. I am having trouble telling the difference now.

You know, once upon a time, the United States had a Department of War. It's job was to ensure that our country was always at war with some other country. We ditched it in favor of a Department of Defense. I am having trouble telling the difference now.

Maybe the US mostly won its wars back then when they were waged against other nations and to defend the rights of US citizens. Today it looks different: both the War on Terror and the War on Drugs look like wars waged to a considerable extent against the rights of US citizens. No wonder they're not going well.

Life has been curious to me. When I was much younger, I was rabidly anti-drug, and considered the taking of one to mess with the clarity of thought. Having grown older, and been to college, I've found that it's very easy to be against something, when you've had no experience with it. Experience tends to teach us the flaws in our thinking.

As for this War on Terror, the story of the boy who cried wolf comes to mind. Quite a few people are milking the government right now with paranoid delusions of illusory enemies, offering solution after solution in bad faith, administering placebos or poison instead of medicine, congratulating each other as they plunder the public's wallet. Were I not dimly aware that I might be nearby when something truly terrible arrives, and the government is either tapped out or the populace apathetic, I might enjoy watching these people as they try to flee something unthinkable. Hopefully the weight of their ill-gotten proceeds will weigh them down, long enough for something like Mr. Market to catch up to them. Pity that karma does not have the accuracy that some of our laser-guided projectiles sport; I hate to think of how many people are suffering because of this nonsense.

You know, once upon a time, the United States had a Department of War. It's job was to ensure that our country was always at war with some other country. We ditched it in favor of a Department of Defense.

Only the first sentence in the quoted block is true.

I agree with pretty much everything else you said in your post, but by winding up with silliness like this, you don't strengthen your point any.

'Twas a quote from one of my Political Science professors (Richard Dilworth). The man has the ability to divine the truth in matters of history and politics, as well as to speak it in the presence of others who are probably offended, which is a rare item in of itself.

So yes, on his analysis, the stated goals and so much literature put forth to the common people may say one thing, while reality says something else entirely.